An Afghan policewoman shot and killed an American adviser outside the police headquarters in Kabul today, the latest in a rising tide of insider attacks by Afghans against their foreign allies, senior Afghan officials said.

The MPs who stayed in the Commons Chamber yesterday after so many of their colleagues had poured out at the end of a Prime Minister’s Questions studded with seasonal references, jolly and otherwise, were privy to a sobering moment in the history of the past 11 years.

The Taliban has billed a rash of insider attacks targeting international troops in Afghanistan as an effective battlefield strategy, but detailed data disclosed recently by the US military suggest that the largest percentage of such incidents probably stemmed from personal motives rather than enemy infiltration.

An American service member was killed and three others were wounded Thursday afternoon when a suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into a heavily armored military vehicle just outside a base where US Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta had been visiting troops earlier in the day.

A squad of nine suicide bombers attacked a major US-Afghan air base in the eastern city of Jalalabad just after dawn Sunday, exploding bombs at the front gate and sparking a lengthy firefight with both Afghan and NATO forces inside.

"It's not how hard you play, it's where you put it," maintains Lisa Modlich, a fiercely competitive octogenarian and former French resistance fighter. She's one of the eight OAPs from around the world tracked in Hugh Hartford's lovely documentary about the Over-80s Table Tennis Championships, held in Inner